Launching a successful beauty brand takes more than a good idea these days. If you don’t have a well thought out plan and a strategy for your brand, you’re flirting with disaster.
When you look at what it takes to even think about having a business, it’s a lot of work. The mental energy and research can be taxing. So … when you’re talking about launching your brand, there are things that you’ll want to have in place even before you can actually take it to market. One of those things is your vision.
Launching an online beauty business? We understand your frustration and disappointment as beauty business entrepreneurs, because we’ve gone through it too.
Now that you know you want to have a successful beauty brand, what is your vision for your company?
Is your vision to be known as the company that creates serums that are essential oil based? Or do you want to be known as the company that helps reduce the use of paper by using recycled packaging as containers?
Without a clear vision, even the greatest, most innovative idea is not going to take root and be able to provide you with the income or the lifestyle that you’d like to have from a successful business.
But you need more than just a vision. A lot of you will get lost in the excitement of choosing a logo, a color palette, designing your website, how many products you’re going to launch, and so on. All of that’s good, but to give your brand the solid foundation it’s going to need to enter the market, it’s imperative that you explore the mundane. The mundane will help your Vision manifest.
For many of you as new entrepreneurs in the beauty industry, the mundane details are the key things that you have to take care of before you can have a successful beauty brand launch.
Those mundane things include a business plan, a financial strategy, budgets, studying your competitors and determining what your concept is. And, most importantly, testing your strategies to see whether or not they’ll actually work for your beauty brand.
Let’s go back to studying competitors for a minute. Taking a look at the competition, establishing a budget and testing your idea with consumers, before you spend one dime on brand and product development will save you thousands of dollars in the long run.
And it will ensure that you have a seamless transition in creating your beauty brand so everything falls into place as you move through each phase of brand development.
After optimizing your business, it’s time to take a look at the fun part: planning and designing. This phase starts the process by identifying the core elements that your business will be known for. Questions to ask include:
You need to be methodical and logical when setting budgets and researching competition. But you have more freedom as you build your brand positioning (the story, platform, logo, icons, guidelines).
During the planning and design phase, you will also deal with your creative photography. Here, the old cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words couldn’t be more true. When you build your website – yes, you do need a website to market your business and products online – it’s the product images that are an important component to bringing sales.
The more clear and inviting they are, the better.
This is not a project you want to leave in the hands of your teenager. If your teenager is studying photography and they’ve got a product photography mentor in school that’s going to help them with this.
Now, how are you going to build your brand? By now you’ll have taken a look at such things as your identity, your story, what intrigued you the most about the niche you chose and the logo you chose. Those are part of the creative assets for your business.
When you start looking at moving into a more concrete phase of building your brand, you’ll want to start taking a look at:
Then there are certain kits. Will you develop sample kits to let potential customers sample and enjoy your product? This could encourage them to buy the full product?
Finally, look at how your product will be delivered and how you will operate your business. Conceptualization, creating and producing your new brand is all a part of what it’s going to take for you to get it to market and hopefully thrive. Your identity should be in place, your formula should be optimized and stable, your packaging is done and now you’re ready to “go to market”.
Even after all this, there’s still a lot to be done. Consumers won’t just come to you because you’ve built it. You’ll have to maintain a very aggressive sales plan.
If you’re going to put it in retail stores, consumer purchases are important and you’ll also have to keep your brand on target. More importantly you’ll want to be able to have inventory to sell on hand so you can replenish those products that are a hit with the consumer and start selling out.
You’re going to need public relations, editorial managers for magazines and online sites are going to be crucial. Social media campaigns are going to play a pivotal role in you marketing and launching your brand.
These are just a few of the focal points that must be given your attention and things for you to start taking a look at as you establish being a serious entrepreneur.
It’s one thing to create a product so that friends and family will be able to enjoy it, but it’s a completely different environment and arena if you’re going to take this product to market.
You’ll need to handle all these areas so the public will want to know your beauty brand. After that, they’ll give you their hard-earned money for the product you’ve worked so diligently and passionately to create.
Feeling frustrated? Let us know what’s got you in a frenzy about launching your beauty business. We’re here to help. That’s it for this week. As always, we’re …
Dedicated To Your Success,
Juliette